Despite a dramatic threat by a papal delegate to excommunicate priests who failed to comply with orders about how to celebrate Mass from the governing synod of India’s Syro-Malabar Church, the deadline came and went Sunday with only a handful of parishes celebrating Mass in the prescribed fashion and one rebel priest actually suing the papal envoy in a civil court.
In the primatial basilica of the Syro-Malabar Church, St. Mary’s Cathedral in Ernakulam, a recently appointed vicar who attempted to celebrate the Mass in the prescribed fashion was turned back by protestors, and the vicar was forced to announce that Mass is suspended until further notice.
All told, estimates are that only six of 328 parishes in the Archeparchy of Ernakulam-Angamaly actually obeyed the delegate’s warning.
The resistance came in the teeth of an ultimatum issued Aug. 17 by Slovakian Archbishop Cyril Vasil, a Jesuit and the former number two official at the Vatican’s Dicastery for Eastern Churches, who was appointed by Pope Francis on July 31 as his delegate to Ernakulam-Angamaly, where a swath of priests and laity have been in open rebellion for months.
Vasil had set Sunday, Aug. 20, as the deadline for priests to celebrate Mass in the fashion prescribed the bishops of the church, which envisions the priest facing the people during the Liturgy of the Word but turning toward the altar during the Liturgy of the Eucharist, and warned priests who didn’t obey of possible punishments under church law.
Papal delegate throws down a gauntlet to dissidents in India’s Syro-Malabar Church
That edict has been strongly resisted in Ernakulam-Angamaly, where the custom is for the priest to face the congregation throughout the celebration.
According to a spokesperson for Almaya Munnettam, an association of priests and laity that has been spearheading the opposition, only six parishes actually conducted Mass Sunday in the prescribed fashion, and in another seven cases, Mass was interrupted in churches where there had been an attempt to celebrate according to the new system.
According to a statement, the association “congratulated the priests, more than 450 of them, who courageously stood along with 550,000 believers” in resisting the edict of the church’s synod and the papal delegate.

A Catholic priest in the Indian state of Goa was granted “anticipatory bail” Aug. 8 after police registered a criminal case against him for allegedly “hurting Hindu sentiments” in remarks he made about a Hindu king during a Sunday Mass in July.
Hindu groups had staged demonstrations in front of the police station calling for criminal charges to be brought against Father Bolmax Pereira, parish priest of St. Francis Xavier Church in Chicalim in the Archdiocese of Goa.
Pereira was quoted in the Mass posted on YouTube saying that 17th-century Hindu king Chatrapati Shivaji “was a national hero but not a god.”
“There are a few people for whom Shivaji has become a god … Yes, he is a national hero. We have to honor and respect him. What he has done, the battles he fought to protect his people … for all that he deserves respect. He is a hero, but not a god. … We have to have a dialogue with our Hindu brethren and ask them ‘Is Shivaji your God? Or a national hero?’ If he is a national hero, let it be at that. Don’t make him a god. We need to understand their perspective. If we live in fear, we will not be able to rise again,” the Indian Express quoted Pereira’s homily Aug. 5 after police filed a criminal case against him.
Hindu nationalist groups had shared the Catholic priest’s remarks on social media and carried out demonstrations demanding his arrest for offending their “religious sentiments.”
The police submitted in the trial court on Aug. 8 that “Father Bolmax Pereira is not required in custody in connection with the [case] registered against him in the Shivaji Maharaj [great king] row.”
Following this police response, the court accepted the priest’s plea for “anticipatory bail” in the case against him. As many as four cases related to the same incident have been registered against Pereira in four different police stations in Goa.
Goa, the tiny former Portuguese colony on the west coast of India, was evangelized by St. Francis Xavier, whose mortal remains are preserved in the Bom Jesus Cathedral. The number of Christians — most of whom are Catholic — has been steadily declining and now comprise a quarter of the state’s 1.6 million population. The state has been ruled by the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for more than a decade.
“Anticipatory bail” in the Indian legal system allows the accused to be released from police custody even if arrested for an alleged crime. In Pereira’s case, the court ruled that in the event he is arrested for the crime, he is to be released on a bond of 20,000 rupees ($240) and a surety.

A Protestant pastor in a northern Indian state has been attacked for allegedly conducting religious conversions.
Pastor Shyju Joseph was conducting Sunday worship on Aug. 6 at his place in Bihar state’s Nawada district. Members of the Bajrang Dal (brigade of Lord Hanuman), a Hindu nationalist organisation, disrupted the service after accusing him of converting people to Christianity.
“They asked him to accompany them and made him sit on a motorcycle. Later, he was beaten up badly,” Christian activist Minakshi Singh told UCA News on Aug. 7.
Singh, general secretary of Unity in Compassion, a charity based in neighboring Uttar Pradesh state, said, “As of now, no complaint has been filed.”
We have contacted our people in Bihar to help the victim register a police complaint, Singh added.
Police took him to Sharif Sadar Hospital in Nawada district where he was undergoing treatment for his injuries, she added.
“Pastor Joseph’s condition is serious but he is stable now,” the Christian lay leader said.
A member of Persecution Relief, an inter-denominational organization in India, criticized the state government for not filing a case against the pastor’s attackers.
“Are the attackers above the law of the land?” the member, who did not want to be named, said.
He said he has urged the state government to take tough action against the attackers.

The return of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi to the Indian Parliament 135 days after his disqualification has reassured people’s faith in the Indian judiciary, say some Christian intellectuals.
Gandhi, who represented Kerala’s Wayanad constituency in the Lok Sabha, was reinstated August 7 after the Supreme Court stayed his conviction in a criminal defamation case.
Gandhi was disqualified as a Lok Sabha member on March 24, a day after a Gujarat court convicted him and sentenced him to two years in jail.
A punishment of two years or more automatically disqualifies a lawmaker.
While Jesuit social scientist Father Cedric Prakash says Gandhi’s reinstatement “is a step in the right direction,” his confrere Father Stanislaus Alla, a moral theology professor in Delhi, says the apex court’s action reassures that the Indian judiciary is willing to uphold the laws instead of succumbing to pressures.
Father Alla says people become sad, frustrated and angry when they see justice denied, helping falsehood to prevail.
“However, our sacred books, including the Bible and the Upanishads declare that ‘Truth’ alone should prevail and not falsehood,” he explains.
Father Cedric says Gandhi’s conviction by various courts in Gujarat, his expulsion from parliament and subsequent stay by the Supreme Court “throw up many important lessons which could have an important bearing on the future of democracy in India.”

Catholics, including priests, in an archdiocese in southern India say they will not cooperate with a Pontifical Delegate who arrived to help find a solution to the decades-old liturgy dispute in their eastern rite Syro-Malabar Church.
A five-member delegation of some 400 priests in the Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese on Aug. 8 met Pontifical Delegate Archbishop Cyril Vasil of Slovakia to communicate their decision.
“We have informed our difficulty to engage with him any further,” said Father Jose Edassery, who was among the five-member delegation.
The prelate, a former secretary of the Office for Eastern Churches and head of the Greek Catholic diocese of Kosice in Slovakia, arrived on Aug. 4 at the Church’s base in southern Kerala state.
Vasil in an Aug. 5 pastoral exhortation asked Catholics in the archdiocese to pray for the success of his mission. It said the pope appointed him to implement the “synodal decision on the uniform mode of celebration.”
A memorandum the priests handed over to Vasil, a copy of which was made available to UCA News, said they cannot cooperate with him for such a mission.
“We hereby reiterate our loyalty to the Holy Father Pope Francis. But, we have reservations to put into practice the exhortation regarding the uniform mode of celebration of Mass,” the memorandum stated.
The priests and laity in the archdiocese have rejected the order of the Mass approved by the Church’s synod, saying they cannot agree to its archaic demands to turn to the altar during Eucharistic prayer. They want to continue to celebrate Mass facing the people throughout, as they have been doing for the past five decades.
The memorandum said the Jesuit archbishop is adamant about implementing synod approved mode of Mass in the archdiocese without having any dialogue with those opposing it.
“You have categorically stated that there is no room for dialogue and that you have no mandate to report our requests and concerns to the Holy Father. It is felt that your language and approach are at times of threatening rather than of dialogue,” the priests said in the memorandum.
“By doing so, we feel that your mission has become ineffective even before it took off.”

Charred walls, collapsed tin roofs and smashed windows in a burned Kuki community church illustrate how deadly ethnic violence has led to brutal sectarian attacks in India’s troubled Manipur state.
At least 120 people have been killed since May in armed clashes between the predominantly Hindu Meitei majority and the mainly Christian Kuki in the northeastern state.
The ruins of the Kuki church in Imphal are just one among the more than 220 churches and 17 Hindu temples destroyed in the months of vigilante violence, according to a report by India Today news magazine.
Across the street from the burned church, Baptist priest Zuan Kamang Damai led a service on Sunday with a congregation just a third of its usual size of about 800 after many of his Kuki parishioners fled.

“After this violence erupted, they moved to different places to save their lives,” he said.
“They want to come back, they want to resettle, they want to live with my family,” Damai said. “This is what they responded to me, and I comfort them. God is there.”
Damai is himself a Naga, another major tribal group in the area who have largely been spared in the cycle of revenge attacks.
But many of his regular worshippers are staying away, fearful of the possibility of violence.
“We have to respect each religion — regardless of Christians, regardless of Hindu, Muslim, whatever,” the 55-year-old said.

A top team of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India that visited the conflict-ridden areas of Manipur has criticized the prolonged silence and apathy of the law enforcement agencies in containing violence in the northeastern Indian state.
“It is our earnest appeal that the governance system should uphold the secular fabric of our country, reinforce constitutional values and cultivate an environment of peaceful co-existence of various communities,” asserts the team led by the conference president Archbishop Andrews Thazhath of Trichur.
The team that visited various places in Manipur July 23-24 included the conference’s deputy secretary general Father Jervis D’Souza and Father Paul Moonjely, executive director of Caritas India, humanitarian response organization of CBCI.
It was the first CBCI official team to visit Manipur where clashes between Kuki tribal people and Meitei people erupted 82 days ago, killing more than 160 people and rendering thousands homeless. As many as 349 churches and institutions have also perished in the violence.
The visit also took place five days after a video surfaced on social media showing two women being paraded naked and later gang raped. The 26-minute video triggered national outrage prompting Prime Minister Narendra Modi to speak about Manipur for the first time. The incident occurred on May 4, but the world did not know about it until because of a ban on the internet in Manipur.

With India and observers elsewhere in the world stunned by a viral video of the naked parading and public rape of two Christian women in simmering Manipur state, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had little option but to break his widely deplored silence on the bloodshed there.
“The video showing atrocity against women in Manipur is the most shameful,” acknowledged Modi while entering the Indian Parliament on July 20 for its monsoon session, reacting to the shocking May 4 video. Amid the national outcry, Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)  government has banned viewing of the video in India.
“The Manipur incident has shamed the entire humanity and [1.4 billion] people of the country are feeling shamed,” added Modi.
Modi’s delayed response was criticized by Catholics leaders.
“The Prime Minister’s reaction has come too late. He should have spoken out when the bloodshed started but just kept quiet all through,” Archbishop Dominic Lumon of Imphal, who heads the Catholic Church in the strife-torn state, told the Register.
“Fear is pervasive even now [after 79 days] and peace remains a dream for us. Everyone is living in fear as violence keeps erupting in the [Imphal] Valley and its peripheries frequently,” added Archbishop Lumon, who heads the 100,000-member local Catholic Church in the tiny state in northeast India, which has a total population of less than four million people.
“On some days, there is relaxation of curfew. But yesterday it was strict curfew due to fresh violence.”
Reports of tribal Kuki attacks on ethnic Meiteis circulated immediately after the protest, which in turn plunged the Imphal Valley that accommodates 90% of Manipur’s population into an outburst of violence against Kuki tribal Christians. At the same time, ethnic Meitei settlements in the Kuki-dominated hills surrounding the valley also were the targets of violence.
While the official death count now totalling around 150, with the overwhelming majority of the victims being Kuki Christians, human rights observers estimate the figure to be underestimated.

Sister Gloria Cecilia Narváez Argoti, a Catholic missionary abducted in the west African country of Mali, describes her five-year-captivity as “spiritually transformative” and a blessing in her life.
The Colombian nun was abducted in February 2017 in Southern Mali by what was later discovered to be a jihadi group.
She narrated her experience in the Foreword of the 2023 edition of the Religious Freedom in the World Report, which Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) published on June 22.
“Undoubtedly, it was one of the most spiritually transformative experiences of my life. Today, looking back, even though it sounds paradoxical, it was perhaps one of the greatest blessings that God has given me,” Sister Gloria said in the report on Christian persecution, which painted a grim picture of Africa.
She said that writing the Foreword of the report was an opportunity to speak out against religious intolerance and Christian persecution.
“I am aware of the importance of speaking about this fundamental right – religious liberty – to ensure that it is protected, especially within a polarized society where attempts are made to sweep under the carpet the abuses committed against the freedom to profess religious beliefs,” Sister Gloria said.
The member of the Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of Mary Immaculate added that her mission in Mali and her experience with jihadists in the West African country had taught her the importance of love and respect regardless of one’s religious affiliation.
She narrated having shared her captivity with two women: a Muslim and a Protestant, and added, “I learned that if we love, accept and respect one another, we can live as brothers and sisters.”
Accepting one another, she clarified, does not mean giving up one’s beliefs, “for true respect, is about listening, welcoming, and acknowledging everyone for who they are.”